In his first speech as C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo decided to come out swinging against WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service,” the former Kansas congressman said in prepared remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Thursday. “Assange is a narcissist who has created nothing of value,” Pompeo continued. “He relies on the dirty work of other to make himself famous. He is a fraud—a coward hiding behind a screen. And in Kansas, we know something about false Wizards.”

Pompeo didn’t mince words tying WikiLeaks to Russia, noting that U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that Assange’s organization assisted the Kremlin by publishing hacked Democratic Party e-mails last summer. “In January of this year, our intelligence community determined that Russian military intelligence—the G.R.U.—had used WikiLeaks to release data of U.S. victims that the G.R.U. had obtained through cyber operations against the Democratic National Committee,” he said. Pompeo declined to mention that the same U.S. intelligence agencies also concluded that Russia’s cyber campaign was intended to help elect his new boss, Donald Trump. Nor did he note that Trump himself had previously called on Russian hackers to break into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server.

Of course, Pompeo has his own history of backing WikiLeaks when it is politically convenient. While the C.I.A. director slammed WikiLeaks on Thursday for being “overwhelmingly [focused] on the United States while seeking support from anti-democratic countries,” Pompeo wasn’t always so actively opposed to the organization. “Need further proof that the fix was in from Pres. Obama on down?” Pompeo said in a now-deleted tweet from his congressional Twitter account, referencing a conservative blog post last summer. “BUSTED: 19,252 Emails from DC Leaked by Wikileaks.” WikiLeaks tweeted out a screenshot of the tweet on Thursday, before going on to troll the C.I.A. by publishing links to several unflattering stories about Pompeo and the agency.

Pompeo’s newfound antagonism toward WikiLeaks isn’t unusual for a U.S. intelligence official, but it does represent a marked shift in opinion for a Trump administration official. On the campaign trail last fall, Trump made no efforts to hide his approval for WikiLeaks’ work, particularly the publication of e-mails between Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta. “I love WikiLeaks,” he declared at a rally in Pennsylvania last October. “It’s amazing how nothing is secret today when you talk about the Internet.” The Trump administration took a different attitude toward Assange’s organization last month when WikiLeaks published thousands of documents pertaining to C.I.A. software that lets the agency break into personal electronic devices. “This alleged leak should concern every single American in terms of the impact it has on our national security,” Trump spokesman Sean Spicer said in a press briefing in March.